“... go with their fanciful pedigrees (they boasted of founders ranging from the first Pope Gregory to King Arthur), they adopted fancy ways of living, which involved long stays in Edinburgh and London and mounting expenditure on food, wine and clothes. In Devine’s words, the chiefs were attempting ‘to live in the style of 18th-century gentlemen on the meagre ...”

“... that ‘there is some connection between Burns’s “Vision” and the vision of Boethius.’ James Kinsley’s encyclopedic Oxford edition of the poems and songs has traced this connection, in its assessment of sources for the work. The supernatural devices of Pope’s Rape of the Lock are employed; the division of the poem into sections called Duans ...”

“... Come-On’ and ‘Remembering Lunch’. ‘The Come-On’ takes its epigraph from Camus: ‘The king’s son who kept watch over the gates of the garden in which I wanted to live’. It does not take the class war quite seriously, and that makes it the more effectively disconcerting. Can I become the king’s son? But ...”

“... two incongruous neighbours: A.E. Housman, anchored by misanthropy to this out-of-the-way spot, and James Klugmann, the chief Communist student organiser, and later a life-long Party worker. I.2 was not an ideal residence. When a gust of wind blew, the small fire, over which toast could be made with the help of a long fork and much patience, threw out billowing ...”

“... produced last January by a small number of ‘hand-picked’ analysts – as James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, described them – from the CIA, the FBI and the NSA. The claims of the last were made with only ‘moderate’ confidence. The label Intelligence Community Assessment creates a misleading impression of ...”

“... of unguarded speech. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’ warned the Apostle James. ‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.’ Dabhoiwala points out that the saying ‘while sticks and stones may break my bones, words can never hurt me’ is first recorded only in 1862, but the contrary ...”

“... on typography, publishers on publishing, lawyers on the law, copyright experts on copyright, Sir James Pitman on shorthand, Winston Churchill on political history, Edward Elgar on music, Gabriel Pascal on film direction, John Reith on the BBC, and especially actors on acting (he was fond of them much in the way one is fond of children: they needed discipline ...”

“... proved itself worthy of fiction. It was, before Sallis began his project, one of the foci for James Lee Burke’s Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux. Sallis had a proper respect for Burke’s achievements: his sense of place, his pacing, his ease of discourse. Burke was very good on food, on the Gulf, the tension in the transit between easy-living in the ...”

“... proudly appropriated the description to themselves. The Homeric phrase ‘people-devouring king’ (demoboros basileus), applied by Achilles to Agamemnon and later used as a generic term for exploitative tyrants, was picked up by a Jacobin cartoon entitled The People, Devourer of Kings. It shows, in Ronald Paulson’s description, ‘the giant ...”

“... and in another language; many émigrés or refugees or transplanted folk (‘homeloose’ in James Wood’s coinage) end up with a rusty, old-fashioned command of their language of origin and an imperfect mastery of the newly acquired tongue. There are a few exceptions, but it is more usual to have one language for the library and another for the bedroom ...”

“... and Sure Hope – with brandishing the torch of faith against the established church.Hopes that James I, who succeeded Elizabeth in 1603, would cut puritans some slack were dashed by the instituting of new church canons. Some protested and were suspended; most capitulated. A brave few took a stand. In 1612 Edward Wightman, who dismissed the Trinity as a ...”

“... style has carried across from the 18th century, and is conducive to the lethal truth. ‘King George may be said to have helped by maintaining a level of unpopularity conducive to uprisings.’ ‘His peculiar talent was simply to voice unchanging principles, a sort of indolence which often passes for integrity.’ Such sentences execute Swift’s ...”

“... Charles was not being taken in by Laud. Were not the Laudians, outwardly so deferential to the king who backed their policies, using his support to entrench the Church’s power so deeply that no future monarch could break it? The political loyalty of bishops was always conditional, after the Reformation as before. That loyalty had looked doubtful in the ...”

“... There is some evidence to suggest he contributed more than an initial to the ‘M’ figure in the James Bond books: hence Masters’s title. ‘M’, true enough, was the office sobriquet of Maxwell Knight, though not his only extra appellation. His work made it necessary for him to have a pseudonym or two at his disposal, and so we find ‘Captain ...”

“... in McTaggart or Bradley. He broke loose from Hegelianism with the help first of William James and then of Russell, Moore and Alexander. But unlike Russell, Anderson did not emerge from his Hegelianism determined to deny whatever Hegel had asserted and to assert whatever Hegel had denied. He continued to respect Hegel – who was himself an ...”